Monday, February 10, 2014

Disaster Recovery is a very important capability of VMware Horizon Mirage. Endpoints change naturally and by default Mirage synchronizes those changes back to the Mirage cluster in the datacenter.

Rumour has it that during the final stages of the agreement with VMware, the owner of Wanova lost his laptop. Normally this would have been catastrophic given the circumstances. In a perfect example of eating their own dog food, Wanova was able to restore his laptop with everything intact in less than an hour using the Mirage System Recovery option.

Mirage System Recovery is smart enough to bring down key pieces to get the user up and running quickly while all the data continues to trickle down. This minimal configuration is referred to as "the minimum working set" required to get the system funtional.

With Mirage the System Recovery Scenario looks as follows

1) Install Mirage (that is if the IT group has not supplied a laptop with Mirage installed)
2) Assign Central Virtual Desktop Image and have the Mirage agent pull down the pieces.
3) The desktop reboots to the new working set to complete the process

In addition Mirage can also be used to initiate a Desktop Repair. To provide an example let's look at the recovery of files.

1) User installs an app that wipes My Documents
2) The system administrator restores snapshot from the central console "No troubleshooting required" (Note: it is important to note that only the files that have changed are sent as a comparison is always done first to identify the deltas before sending the files.)

There are three options to repairing endpoints in Mirage.

1) Restore Snapshot - repair using good files and settings from Snapshot

2) Enforce Base Layer - the mirage agent roles back any changes to the standard base layer within the Central Virtual Desktop.

3) A bare metal option which allows a small Windows 7 image which has the Mirage agent to be booted from a USB drive or PXE booted from the network to pull down the assigned Central Virtual Desktop (CVD) from the datacenter to the endpoint.

In some cases the Disaster Recovery value that Mirage brings is core to a customers decision to integrating the technology.

VMware Horizon Suite

About Me

I am a Principal Cloud Architect at Long View Systems and have spent 16 years designing, implementing, and managing IT Infrastructures in highly available computing environments. My primary areas of focus are the deployment of virtualization (Server, Storage, Desktop, Application and WAN Optimization).